Hollywood loves a franchise. After all, why take a risk on something strange and new and original when you could just take something that people already like and make more of it? Sequels have been a part of the movie business for as long as the movies have existed, which means that by now there are a lot of Part 5s, 6s and 7s knocking about. But what if someone else gets there first? What happens when you're desperate to make a sequel to an established classic, but its mystique has already been severely tarnished by a bunch of inept follow-ups? The remake is an always popular solution, simply take the original film you liked so much and, rather than sequelising, just make it again. Another increasingly useful method is to create an alternative timeline a la Days of Future Past wherein your sequel can happily re-write the narrative up to this point and retcon out anything you don't like, while still keeping the parts of previous episodes that you do. A much brasher, bolder option exists, though, that doesn't involve trying to explain away continuity issues and plot developments in a previous instalment: just pretend they never happened. Yes, these ten sequels were so infuriated by the original follow-ups to their progenitor film that they decided to create their own canon where those sequels don't exist and are replaced by these new films. Confused? You will be.
